Being in NOLA for Fat Tuesday hadn’t crossed our minds. Celebrating a small Mardi Gras  in a small coffee house with fine musicians and some Cajun fare was on the mind, however … until the blizzard arrived. 

For much of the afternoon we held onto hope. For a moment or two earlier in the day we considered going to a protest at the office of U.S. representative before the concert, until the blizzard arrived.

After a morning Zoom meeting much of the rest of the day was spent completing a writing assignment. Another piece I had hoped to have finished still awaits in note form. Between the assignments I decided to take Joe Pye for a hike through the prairie. Then the blizzard hit.

My ever hopeful hound didn’t seem bothered at first, for he’s always gungho about our prairie hikes. It seemed the northern loop might be a bit longer than the south one and just the break necessary to clear the mind. My camera was tucked beneath my arm. Then the blizzard raged. Huge fluffy balls of snow carried by a harsh wind forced snow between my eyes and glasses. Despite being dressed for it, the cold knifed through.

Straight from the north, and we were walking right into the blast. A couple of times I stopped, pulled off the mittens to focus my camera. Not being a “point and shoot” type of photographer, this meant working the aperture and the speed in an attempt to fully capture the moment, the blizzard. Within seconds my fingers felt the wrath of the wind and snow, so the maneuvering was accomplished as rapidly as possible, an image or two captured, and the mittens replaced as rapidly as possible.

The blizzard was more than I had bargained for, so we cut a path through the seedless, wind-bent bluestem toward the woodland. Near the cover of trees we gained the protection we were aiming for. Just inside the canopy was my wood perch. A small bench of cut logs. The afternoon before, in near 50 degree temperatures, I had sat on the perch created by an old friend who back after we had purchased the land had come to clear a path through the grove. Now weathered and cracked, his artwork holds true, and his path is one we still work to keep cleared through the summer, and the one Joe Pye and I would traverse to escape the blizzard.

For several moments I stood looking at Kurt’s little bench, where I had sat a day before with my back against the broken tree to meditate. Nowadays this meditation has a name. Forest bathing, where slow, deep breaths are taken in deeply then released through your arms and legs before being drawn back in, creating a circle of inner peace. 

As you breathe, you check your various senses. What do you see? Ah, the trees, many of them quite old and bent if not broken. Some that had been sawn and now have shoots reaching upwards. Not one or two, but a half dozen or more defying death. Basswood, perhaps. To the north, twin trunks of an old and dominate cottonwood stands as a sentinel along the edge between the woody grove and the northern prairie. It and the adjacent basswood and weedy buckthorn are common hosts to warblers and cedar waxwings, blue jays and sparrows of a woodland-based summer. Now, despite the calmness and quiet of this archway between winter and spring, there are no birds. No chatter. Only a stillness beneath the hum of wind.

Beyond the edge and into the prairie grasses, the wind roars through the grasses and tickles the top of the canopy. Outside of the edge of the trees, just past Kurt’s perch, wind-driven snow nearly rolls in waves across the landscape. The fence row trees separating this half section from the neighbor’s field a mile to the east is lost in the whiteout.

So we move along, Joe Pye and I. He continuously lifts his snout to capture scents that escape me. That is one of the senses you attempt to awaken in your forest bathing meditation. No scents of interest came to this  inadequate human.

We edged along up the slight rise though the stretched arm width of this long cut and worn path I had last cleared in the late autumn. After reaching the apex of the rise, the path led us down toward the hen house and driveway. An expanse of a park-like opening free of invasive buckthorn and weedy burdock was starting to collect a thin carpet of snow, what little could drift through the canopy. Beyond the grove, to the south and west, distant trees were nearly impossible to see through the rolling haze of snow. 

When we reached the end of the wooded path, we then headed to the warmth of the kitchen. Inside, through the beautifully wide window we placed here instead of the twin “double-hungs,” the wind driven snow coursed through the adjacent stalk field, rolling, wind-driven blasts of snow much like the waves on the shores of Lake Superior. Joe Pye lapped his water as warmness filled the hearth, and a calmness settled the soul. Outside the blizzard of March roared mightily, while inside, warmness prevailed.